Stacy Shares: Swimming Games for Beginners

These creative water-play games are brought to you by Melissa & Doug, written by our Blog Ambassador Stacy Teet.

Family fun can be educational, too! -Stacy

One of the items on my summer to do list, right up there with speech therapy appointments and dental visits and camping in our own backyard, is teaching my children to swim.

This is our first summer having any sort of access to a swimming pool, and I do not intend to waste any time! I want my kids to get comfortable in the water as soon as possible. On our most recent trip to the pool, we brought a few Melissa & Doug pool toys along to enhance our playtime.

I was pleasantly surprised by how much the Jolly Jellyfish Sinker toys aided me in teaching the basic techniques of swimming. Also, they were so cute that all three of my children, ages 3-6, wanted to play with them.

We took turns watching them get caught in currents from the pool jets on the stairs. We scooped them up with a Taffy Sea Turtle Net (not pictured here), and when the kids were ready to play, we took turns diving for jellyfish!

This was a fantastic introduction to swimming for my six-year-old. While searching for these cute characters he was also practicing bobbing his head under water, holding his breath, chasing an object and retrieving items from under water–four lessons most swim instructors focus on for beginner swimmers, and here we were practicing these skills without him even knowing it.

A few more days with Pinky, Blinky, Inky and Clyde (bonus points if you can tell me who we named them after) and he’ll be swimming in no time.

Here are a few other swimming toys I’m considering adding to my arsenal:

Stacey using toys is one of the best ways to entice children to learn to swim. Good for you, finding fun, easy to grab diving toys that seem to have multiple uses. One recommendation is to encourage your kids to blow their bubbles underwater while they are picking up the toy. It helps them to get used to the coordination of using their arms and blowing their air out. Better than holding their breath for long term swim skill adaptability! Good luck!

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[...] Water Treasure Chest: Quirky Momma, Stacy writes over at Melissa & Doug’s blog about some fun water toys. This one caught my attention since my boys have taken swimming lessons for years with a teacher who uses a similar “treasure chest” to hold his underwater toys. These toys seem to have special powers that can ONLY be seen underwater. To fully explore what they look like, the boys have willingly been putting their faces in the water to explore. [...]